Every year, the world's elite gathered at Davos for the World Economic Forum, but at the highly exclusive event this year, one finds not only head of states, business magnates, or opinion leaders. In fact, SARA, was also there to interact with the forum's participants. Let's find out who SARA is and what SHE is capable of.

A robot which interacts with humans with the help of cameras and voice recognition was prominently displayed at the World Economic Forum (WEF) recently. "SARA," a "Socially-Aware Robot Assistant " was developed by members of Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. It interacted with participants at the Forum, an example of artificial intelligence one participant predicted will spread across the world.

==YOICHI MATSUYAMA Human-Computer Interaction Institute, CMU==
Social awareness could be anywhere. So we believe that SARA is a platform, or we are calling it social infrastructure. So trust, or in other words rapport, which is closeness between two, social bond, is a social infrastructure.

The research team for SARA is so diverse that it include language technologists, human-computer interactions, machine learning and also animators.

==YOICHI MATSUYAMA, Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University==
So she captures your facial expression, including smile, eye gaze and head nod and also, she can capture intonation and audio features. And then also we do have speech recognition to understand what you said. And then gathering it together to understand the social intention.

Yoichi Matsuyama, a postdoctoral fellow at Carnegie Mellon University was in Davos to introduce the robot to WEF participants. Among them was South Africa's Minister of Economic Development, Ebrahim Patel.

==EBRAHIM PATEL, South African Minister of Economic Development==
I was speaking to a robot and it could detect my sense of emotion: anger, smiling, frowning. And what this really is about, the serious issue behind this is the application of artificial intelligence to so many social jobs that we had historically thought are intrinsically to be performed by human beings.

Patel said the challenge for governments will be to think through the social policies that make this a good experience for human beings, to take human beings out of much of the drudgery and repetitiveness of work, and release human beings to focus on creative things.